However, the existence of urban plans in India is also largely a myth. What we label as ‘plans’ are not mechanisms to enable and facilitate development but mere statutory regulations. Pune city’s last development plan was cleared for implementation in 1987 and it considered a population projection only up to 1997. It did not include the slum population – half the population of the city! This is criminal neglect. There were no demarcated plots and roads in the plan. It covered only the Pune Corporation limits, while the city actually spreads over nine local authorities and into the so called Metropolitan Regional Plan area. There are uncoordinated plans for the Cantonments, MIDC areas, the Info-tech Park, two large municipal corporations, nearby ‘hill stations’, Business Parks and SEZs.
Capitalism thrives on a ‘defined, equitable and stable playing field’. Investors need to invest in land whose actual area, true ownership, land use, development control rules, and allowed FSIs are assured. Land sellers will hold on to their land if they think that every month will bring higher FSIs, relaxed standards and a better return on the sale of land. Urban planning in India has focused on colored Master Plans that designate single-function zones. Within the zones, Development Control Regulations determine the intensity of use through allowable heights, plot coverage and FSIs. Some road and trunk infrastructure projects, often called Development Plan Roads, may be shown. These two-dimensional, colored land-use plans, with reservations for limited roads, amenities and public areas, do not show plot demarcations. Within the statutory framework many changes can be made later through the discretionary powers of the Chief Minister’s opaque Sub-Committee on Urban Development. The system invites corruption.
These regulations and rules specify minimum plot sizes which are too large for the lower middle class or the urban poor to afford. Thus our miniscule efforts at urban planning marginalize about seventy percent of the population, making it impossible to acquire land for shelter. These so-called comprehensive master plans do not facilitate development. They do not allow development by small builders and individuals, and do not enhance the city’s character. In fact the eight- and eleven-storey apartment blocks where people are forced to live are based on a set of building laws created jointly by builders and pliable officials. Plans cannot be a time-bound static set of rules and regulations. I maintain that we do not have plans. These regulatory ‘non-plans’ give credence to the myth that plans hinder economic and social development.
We need Structure Plans that establish the essential networks and transport corridors, protect the environment and public assets, identify mixed use precincts and potential nodes where Urban Villages can be promoted. They demarcate areas where Local Area Plans can be prepared with the participation of the local land owners and other stakeholders. This is in fact very much in accordance with the provisions of the 74th Amendment of the Indian Constitution for the devolution of governance to the ward level. Local Area Plans should utilize land pooling where all the land is ‘banked’ momentarily and then redistributed, after deducting roads, open spaces, amenities and other common resources. Each owner then gets back their proportionate share of demarcated, documented land, not leaving any one a victim of ‘reservations’ or confused over boundaries and rightful ownership. If we utilize professional, facilitating, and enabling plans to guide urban development, urban areas would see orderly and enriching development.
Myth Four: Social legislation protects the marginal, the weak and the poor.
Under the argument that the State will protect the interests of those who are marginalized and powerless, a number of urban social statutory measures have been enacted. That they protect the weaker sections is a myth. In fact they exploit the poor and middle classes, pauperizing and marginalizing them.
Most notable of these legislative acts are the Urban Land Ceiling and Regulation Act of 1976 and the Urban Rent Control Acts. The retrogressive nature of the Town and Country Planning Acts has already been noted above.
The Rent Control Act emerged in the 1940s when cement and steel were diverted to the war effort. At that time large cities had viable rental markets and the measure was meant to protect that market against the likely inflation in rents due to an expected hiatus in construction during the conflict. By extending these statutory measures beyond the war period, creating ‘lifetime’ statutory tenants and freezing rents for these groups, the government effectively killed the active rental market. Over the years a small minority of tenants were awarded highly subsidized units. For decades no new rental stock was created, as the returns on rental investment did not exist. By closing the door on the rental market the city center of Mumbai has critically deteriorated, resulting in collapses and fatalities. The meager statutory rents are inadequate to cover even the basic maintenance of these units. The civic authorities are unable to realize the needed property tax which these valuable downtown properties should be harvesting. The entire metro is the loser. The scenario is similar in other cities plagued with this ‘social legislation’.
While the rental market was being squeezed at one end, the Urban Land Ceiling and Regulation Act of 1976 was throttling it at the other. This measure suddenly removed all large land parcels from the market. An arbitrary system of clearing lands added corruption and confusion. Larger plots were needed to accommodate parking, amenities and open spaces for new housing schemes. It took the relatively urbanized state of Maharashtra decades to tone down these measures, on which Gujarat and other states have effectively closed the chapter, or ameliorated their impact by modifying the rules on how new rental stock should be treated or how large plots should be treated under the acts. But we live on with this dark past.
The more recent scenario involves the release of the mill lands that spread over vast areas of the older part of Mumbai. In a generation when a continuous chain of four chief ministers have been urban developers, these lands were released into their own party members’ hands. Worse, there was no plan to integrate all these lands into the city fabric and into one another. The result is that wonderful city center sites have focused on the extremely high income, high rise Mumbaikar and MNC tenant, excluding the average citizen from the new policy.
Another policy thrust is the Slum Rehabilitation Act where a developer builds multi-storied apartment blocks of 269 square feet each on forty percent of the land acquired and high income towers on the remaining sixty percent. People who lived on or near the ground, whose lives spread out and intermingled with common open spaces, now live high up in overcrowded cubbyholes. Better hygiene and more solid structures are a positive aspect of this development. But the strong-arm tactics adopted to gain community consent to participate in these schemes is a questionable expression of our democratic values. This scheme is builder-friendly and creates no new housing for the poor. Touted as a ‘housing strategy’, it is merely a strategy to house the very rich at the expense of a more democratic policy.
The result of these measures has been to make the supply side of the housing stock smaller and reduce the options and channels through which people can achieve housing. This increases the number of households forced to live in illegal slums, on the margins of society and dependent on criminals who control them. These measures must be immediately ended.
Myth Five: We have an army of urban development finance and development institutions to resolve urban problems.
Over the past four decades the semblance of a mature urban development institutional structure was put into place. The Housing and Urban Development Corporation and The National Housing Bank have operated for decades at the apex level. The Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services Corporation and entities like the Maharashtra State Road Infrastructure Corporation have emerged as major players in India’s urban infrastructure development. Regional urban development corporations, housing boards, infrastructure development bodies, agencies like the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, the City and Industrial Development Corporation and many mo
re across the nation appear to provide myriad instruments for the nation to solve its critical urban infrastructural problems.
The functions and scopes of these agencies often overlap and duplicate one another in conflicting manners. Many are dinosaurs from ‘supply side’ economic policy, attempting in vain to fill projected gaps. Others are part of the ‘License Raj’ issuing ‘No Objection Certificates,’ while harvesting bribes. For example, one needs to obtain seventeen NOCs in Mumbai to obtain an Occupancy Certificate. All officials are against a single-window approach as that would concentrate corruption in fewer hands! Their hierarchy and jurisdictions create confusion and unhealthy institutional competition. For years the apex bodies played the numbers game in generating housing units, neglecting urban infrastructure. Many stakeholders in the construction system have been ignored in the focus on large scale systems. For instance building material manufacturers and small housing contractors are marginalized in the focus on mega-projects. Large reservoirs and huge water supply pipelines feed potable water to the city. Yet within the city there are inadequate water taps in slums and high density tenements. The manner in which huge metropolitan transport projects have been forced down the throats of the local citizens who will pay for them is becoming legendary. These urban projects are well-tuned mechanisms for corruption, bribery and the enhancement of the black money economy. It is a myth that these agencies are addressing urban problems. They are creatures of a dysfunctional urban management system driven by ambitions of personal aggrandizement.
The sea-change in perception over the past decade is that we do need economic infrastructure and we need it fast. In this pursuit a few major projects like the Delhi Metro and the Mumbai-Pune Expressway have raised the nation’s confidence level.
When a society is raised on biased attitudes and myths, it may introduce new programs and global slogans. But the underlying top-down, opaque and centralized decision making, fueled by a culture of corruption, continues to stoke the fires those myths ignited.
Letter
Poverty Alleviation in Cities
Throughout the world, preparations are afoot for the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements – HABITAT II – during 3-14 June, 1996 in Turkey. This ‘Rio-like’ meeting organized by UNCHS (Habitat), with its headquarters in Nariobi, will examine human settlements issues in the context of sustainable development; adopt a statement of principles and commitments; create a global plan of action; and review the implementation of past UN programs. It will also call for a focus on the specific needs of women in housing.
In India, too, several consultation meetings and conventions are being organized in preparation for the conference. Efforts are also on to bring about active involvement of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and Community Based Organizations (CBOs) in the preparatory processes for HABITAT II. According to me, all this is taking place when the world community itself lacks a clear statement of purpose. The UNO has a faint voice in the realm of poverty and people’s rights when it comes to basic services. I therefore feel that we in India should apply our minds to the stresses of people, rather than to physical things like houses and infrastructure, and must breathe a purposeful voice into HABITAT II, which would now pretend to be the archetypal forum, when in fact it could be christened a rudderless ship.
Since Independence, India has struggled with numerous development problems through its Five Year Plans, Community Development Programmes, Special Area Development Programmes and scarcity relief efforts. With more than eighty percent of its population dependent on agriculture over the greater part of the post-Independence period, it approached ‘urban problems’ with much hesitation. Moreover, it was felt that cities already had a disproportionate share of infrastructure and services, and that more urban investments would attract the rural poor to cities. Rural-urban migration was regarded as ‘bad’. Marxists, Gandhians and the feudal power elites alike shared this distaste for cities. Underlying this phobia was the realization that cities were the tax base of the dreamed-of socialist system. Cities were the ugly engine that pulled the beautiful train.
Regardless of how naïve such assumptions were, they did temper both government and international donor agency thinking alike. At the same time, a major proportion of urban public investment went into essential urban infrastructure, such as roads, power generation and transmission, sewerage, water reservoirs and supply networks. These investments tended to be on ‘trunk infrastructure’, not at the ‘user-end’. Housing boards created planned neighborhoods, whose costs placed their houses beyond the reach of even the lower middle class. Still, their efforts made a minuscule dent on shelter requirements.
Under World Bank funding the future populations of cities like Mumbai were projected and their water requirements were calculated. Catchments for rainfall, watersheds for dams and reservoirs, canals, holding ponds and pipes were designed. Large water purification systems were created. But the link between this huge public health infrastructure and the common urban household was missing. Stand-pipe taps in high density, often illegal, slums were missing. This lacuna was the source of stress, the statement of the problem and the hint of solutions for all urban infrastructure issues.
The NGOs had a similar concern regarding the rural-urban issue, but used their limited efforts in urban areas to promote more participatory processes and enhanced user-end accessibility by the poor. The concern that a range of basic services do not reach the poor has emerged more recently.
Housing construction was popular with government and NGOs alike over several decades, because it was a visible output with reasonable financial accountability. Development could be ‘seen’. Several fundamental barriers, however, plagued shelter inputs. In brief these were:
1. Land Tenure: The poorest households have illegally squatted on other people’s land, creating a situation wherein qualification for loans, statutory recognition and essential services has proven very difficult, if not impossible, to provide. To some extent legislation in the mid-1990s alleviated the bottlenecks.
2. Replicability: Even when very minimal ‘demonstration’ units were affordable, hidden overheads, complex organizational inputs and special financial arrangements rendered these ‘pilot projects’ mere showpieces propped by hidden subsides. These were never replicable models. At great cost a few households were subsided. The subsidies were ‘encashed’ by the beneficiaries who sold the houses and pocketed the unearned increment.
3. Ability-to-pay Constraints: The cost of a housing unit must be estimated under the following heads: land for the shelter; share of public lands in the immediate neighborhood (roads, convenience shopping, open areas and footpaths) which support the house plot; civil works; trunk infrastructure overheads, professional design/management fees; and loan interest payments during construction itself. Not to be forgotten is ‘profit’. If a builder is involved, or even a petty contractor, a minimum of fifteen percent must be assumed as a reasonable profit. These expenses add up to the principal package to be amortized over the loan repayment period. Principal and interest payments must be made monthly to pay back the housing loan. The poorest households simply cannot afford the resulting monthly installments, nor is strict monthly regularity in tune with their irregular cycle of earning.
4. Target Groups: In any slum a range of low income groups live together. Slums are not economically homogeneous. Programs targeted at the ‘poorest of the poor’ usually end up in the hands of the ‘better-off’ groups within the poor. Indeed affordability constraints tend to match the better-off amongst the poor with the benefits of shelter programs. A study carried out by Centre for Development Studies and Activities showed that it would cost a poor household about Rs. 600 (in 1986.) merely to do the eligibility documentation for a loan of Rs. 10,000. Thus, the actual beneficiaries tend to be the better-off households. Other than an escalation due to inflation in the amounts involved, conditions remain the
same in 2010.
5. Infiltration: Because of the above, most shelter schemes are subsidized under almost every cost component. This makes it very attractive for a poor family to sell a subsidized shelter at near-market value, converting the subsidy into expendable cash. Thus, they escape the amortization rigor and make a windfall profit. If any of the cost components noted in (3) above are subsidized, even if profit is eliminated, that level of subsidy becomes a measure of the ‘infiltration factor’. The goals and objectives of donors and local NGOs are subverted in the long run.
6. Loan Recuperation: The default rate increases dramatically as income levels decrease. This is due to: (a) low ability to pay; (b) amortization systems demanding regular payments from households with irregular incomes; (c) lack of ‘reach’ of banking systems; (d) political instigation against making payments; and (e) inadequate, or unenforceable penalty systems. Other demands on poor households’ limited incomes take priority over repayments to an unseen banking institution. Community level banking systems, built on the Grameen Bank model, have had greater success.
‘Housing’, as such, never reached the poor in a significant way. If one looks at the numbers, it neither had an impact on the homeless nor did a significant process emerge that would bring shelter to the masses. It is often referred to as an ‘employer of NGOs’ as noted by R. I. Shah of Vikas Centre for Development, Ahmedabad. It is not the needs of the beneficiaries, but needs perceived by the donors that get realized. Perhaps it is the only ‘skills’ that a NGO composed of architects and engineers can provide. Worst of all, the truly poor can be displaced by housing investments. Either the shelter becomes too expensive, or default on payments makes an oustee of the householder. Even such a carefully tempered program as the Hyderabad Community Development Programme resulted in displacements; and it is always the vulnerable within the poor who are displaced.
Letters To A Young Architect Page 20